Manky old bananas

Exhibit A:

We always seem to have a few over-ripe bananas hanging about hopefully in the fruit bowl. When my children see them, they look at me, roll their eyes and suggest politely that we get on and make some banana bread. The relevant page of Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess is so covered in cake batter and fingerprints that it's almost illegible. But today I was looking for something quick and easy to make with Smallest of All, who had declared that he had a burning desire to do some baking. The banana loaf is not exactly challenging, in fact it's pretty foolproof, but I wanted super-quick-before-the-others-get-back-from-the-supermarket. Muffins! Again! But you can freeze them, and if you take one out first thing, it's defrosted by breaktime, so perfect for the school snack or lunch box as well as for breakfast.

Clearly, the first thing you must do when baking with bananas and a 5 year-old is to perform the magic trick of Making The Banana Sink Into The Table. <dim the lights, roll of drums>

Exhibit B:

<rapturous applause>

You can then proceed to the baking proper. This time, we decided on banana and blueberry muffins. I based this on Gordon Ramsay's recipe from Healthy Appetite, which we've made often before. Packed with fruit, and made with wholemeal flour, they are pretty healthy as cakey things go. I feel a need to at least pay lip service to health with my children's breakfast. I've made a few changes to the recipe in the book, mostly for reasons of wanting something I could fling together with what I had in the house. I've used a mixture of wholemeal and plain flour. GR uses just wholemeal, which is also good; I just wanted something a bit lighter. The original recipe also uses buttermilk, but I didn't have any and I always use milk in muffins because I never do have buttermilk (well, do you?) and it's always worked fine. I also use frozen blueberries, because they are a fraction of the price of fresh blueberries. I use a slightly smaller quantity, and just bung them in frozen, so the batter will take a little longer to cook.

Smallest of All loves breaking eggs, pouring wet into dry, mixing, and sprinkling the demerara sugar on the top ('The bad thing is, you see mummy, I really like this part' <shoves whole hand in sugar jar>).

Blueberry and banana muffins

The dry stuff:
150g plain wholemeal flour
150g plain flour
100g brown sugar
1.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt

The wet stuff:
2 large manky bananas, mashed
280ml milk
75g oil or melted butter
1 large egg, beaten

The extra stuff:
250g-300g frozen blueberries
demerara sugar (for sprinkling)

The method:
1. Preheat oven to 180C and prep the muffin tray (ie put the cases in the holes).
2. Mix the dry stuff together in a big bowl.
3. Mix the wet stuff together in a jug/bowl.
4. Add the wet stuff to the dry stuff until it's just mixed and there are no floury bits. Add the blueberries with the last few stirs.
5. Pour into the muffin cases - they'll be quite full. Sprinkle the demerara sugar on top. Bake for about 25 mins. Small helpers may lick bowls and spoons, assuming you aren't too concerned about raw eggs.
6. Cool in the tin for a few mins and then on a rack.


Exhibit C:

Bon app!

The fruit refusenik

My oldest son does not like fruit. This morning I asked him to write me a list of fruit he would willingly eat if I bought it for him. Here is his list:

I let him have tomatoes because technically he's right, and I was quite impressed that he knew this (he's 6). Also, it would be an even more woeful list without tomatoes.

He'll also countenance various other fruits in puddings or smoothies, but he would no sooner pluck an apple from the fruit bowl than saw his own arm off. I know I don't have it nearly as bad as some parents - he would eat spinach pasta until it was coming out of his ears, and he orders fish and chips at school, eats the fish and leaves the chips. But I still mourn the days when he used to eat blueberries as if they were sweeties.

I've found two ways to get round his aversion. The first is to melt a bar of chocolate in the microwave, mix it with a pot of custard, chop up bits of various fruits (bananas and strawberries and  mangoes, obviously, but he might just be persuaded to eat a cherry or a raspberry this way), decant the custard into little ramekins and serve it up as 'chocolate fondue'. I'm not in the habit of serving custard for breakfast though, and I can think of better ways to start my day than peeling mangoes and pineapples.

The second is bircher muesli. Now, my son and heir is mad for porridge, and bircher muesli is not a million miles from porridge I guess, but he absolutely laps this up. There are many ways to skin the bircher cat. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall likes dried apricots on his, and Gordon Ramsay uses milk rather than OJ, and adds toasted walnuts (yum). Here's my son's favourite though:

I usually make up a big jar of muesli base, mostly rolled oats, with seeds added (sunflower/pumpkin is my usual, but you could add sesame or linseeds, or nuts if you prefer), and dried fruit (I use raisins and dates, but again, whatever floats your boat). If you're feeling really lazy, Waitrose do bags of bircher muesli base. It contains dried raspberries, which would be viewed with great suspicion by my son, so I haven't tried it, and it's really no hassle to make up a jar of the base once every few weeks.

He usually takes this to school for his morning snack rather than having it for breakfast, so I decant a snack sized portion of the base into a container, and then grate in an apple, and squeeze an orange into it. Mix it up, dollop of natural yogurt and a squirt of honey and it's good to go. If you want it for breakfast, you can make it up the night before, then just add the yogurt and honey in the morning. In fact, you should make it up the night before, as the juice is supposed to soak into the oats for a while.

I will admit that it probably doesn't look quite as lovely as it might once it's swilled about in his school bag for an hour or so, and he's already told me that his classmates look upon him in horror when he tucks in, so I'm just delighted that he's still willing to take this to school for a snack, and hasn't caved in to cheese-string based peer pressure. I dare say it's only a matter of time.

If you too have a fruit refusenik, give it a go.  Or else tell me what you do to up the vitamin C in your child's diet.